Washington loves nothing so much as a hunt, and the hunt started by the CIA, that set CNN and the rest of the press to croaking like a swamp full of bullfrogs, has been a Royal Hunt, indeed. Built of purest innuendo, the “intelligence dossier” that gave room for full-bore accusations of treason against the President Elect, has been elevated to the level of “credibility” by circuitous statements that hang from nothing but their own brazen assertions. Take this sampling of tautological statements that attempt to turn the “intelligence dossier” into something other than naked slander:

Jesus fucking Christ. This gun isn’t smoking. It’s burst into flame. “The memos describe several purported meetings during the 2016 presidential campaign between Trump representatives and Russian officials to discuss matters of mutual interest, including the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta.” This is the evidence that the election was corrupted by the Trump team’s collusion with a foreign power, and it seems very very very likely Trump knew. Treason.— Rebecca Solnit (Tweet), The New York Times

“Look, don’t take anything in this dossier as gospel. But it’s definitely evidence in favor of some pretty extraordinary claims.” — Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp

With CNN confirming that intelligence chiefs consider this report credible, it’s about time to start using the word “treason.” Markos Moulitsas @markos

The evidence is questionable, but the idea looks entirely plausible … Unverifiable sensational details aside, the Trump dossier is a good reflection of how things are run in the Kremlin … with methods borrowed from the KGB … [so] whatever the truth of Putin’s connections with Trump, [it’s all] pretty scary.­­­ — Andrei Soldatov, The Guardian

Regardless of truth or falsity, I can see why they thought the president-elect should know. — Former CIA Director Michael Hayden

The New Journalism: Believing Double-talk From People Who Lie for A Living

Using weasel-words like “alleged,” “purported,” and “not-Gospel,” to describe the “intelligence dossier,” while simultaneously citing it as “evidence of treason” is just doubletalk. Journalists used to help us make the distinction between allegations and evidence, but that’s not the approach they’re taking here – urging readers to believe for the sake of believing whenever the story is good enough to believe. That a narrative is “stunning and believable” is a description of good fiction, not an indication of its accuracy. That an idea is “plausible” does not commend it to the wise for acceptance, but merely for consideration. That intelligence agents sometimes pass on information “regardless of truth or falsity” does not suggest that, by being passed along, false information becomes true.

But the authors of these words are all urging us to jump to another conclusion, not so tediously weighed down with logic: “When an ‘intelligence agent’ says something, even without a witness or anything more than their own words to support it, we must all stand up and salute it as ‘evidence’”. Well, for those of us with a memory longer than, say, 18 months, we can remember all the way back to when a spook was a spook, and his word, without evidence, was the worthless doubletalk of people who would have to kill you if they told you the truth. How times have changed.

“Less Here Than Meets the Eye”

Americans have been given a choice: to believe that Russia has its hand up Trump’s butt, and is running him like a puppet, or to deny that this is a proven fact. Those of us who are less than convinced that we are facing a commie takeover by Donald the Terrible don’t get a second chance to believe. We’re out of the discussion, exiled from “liberal” society, that has somehow decided to believe whatever the CIA has to say about the guy who was headed for, and now is sitting in, the White House. When we try to run down the facts behind the “intelligence dossier” that has been adopted as true by the same crowd that told us to watch out for “fake news,” we discover there are none. It’s all conjecture. As Tallula Bankhead famously observed, “There is less here than meets the eye.”

The Goal? To Imprison the President in Failed Policies

But the lack of evidence never sways the faith of believers. The beaters in this Royal Hunt have dedicated all of their firepower and noisemaking ability at flushing the President out of his lair and straight into the policy prison where the entire Establishment is now wailing that all Presidents must reside. Or what? There is a possibility of what? A rupture with past policies? An overturning of existing relationships? The reordering of relationships?

All those briefing books Trump refuses to read – they’re full of catechism, not knowledge. They are the latest advice from a cadre of pinheads who haven’t done anything particularly right in US foreign policy as far back as they’ve been an influence. Their catechism teaches that military expansionism is good foreign policy, and their dominance of all Washington thinking has now metastasized into the giant boil of pissed-off spies erupting on the forehead of official Washington in a grotesque, pulsing tumor. The only thing more grotesque than the CIA’s resort to McCarthy-era propaganda tactics is the convulsive Seig-Heiling of the media lackeys as one body, thrilled at last to be part of the “liberal agenda.”

Mistake me not for a Trumper, on this day or any of the remaining days of his administration. Nevertheless, the McCarthyite clamor now resonating the echo-chambers of the media regarding Donald Trump and the “Russian hacking scandal” is mere journalistic flatulence occasioned by gluttonous consumption of fact-free propaganda. What effect it will have on the policies of a man who seems to be hell bent on driving his motorcade through the front yard of the approved political habitation has yet to be seen.